this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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[–] DarkSpectrum@lemmy.world 57 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

I will now attempt a full comment ... brace your hard drives

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[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 61 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I smell something, but it's not overheating electronics.

I've processed over 5 million records on a laptop that's almost 10 years old. it took two days to get my results.

there's no way 60,000 records overheated ANYTHING.

[–] wewbull@feddit.uk 21 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Doesn't actually say that 60k overheated his drive. He says that he ran a run on 60k, and that he couldn't do the whole database due to overheating. Two unrelated statements except that 60k is the lower bound for what he could process.

Doesn't mean he knows what he's doing though, as pretty huge datasets are processable on quite modest hardware if you do it right.

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 13 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

that's somehow worse.

a "data analyst" couldn't cut up the work into a parallel processes and run them synchronously? what the actual fuck?

"sorry, I can only do 60k at a time."

just fucking split them up into 6 parallel batch processes running 10k at a time. it's fucking math, not rocket science. I'm not even an analyst and I could fucking do that much.

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[–] RussianBot8453@lemmy.world 96 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I'm a data engineer that processes 2 billion row 3000 column datasets every day, and I open shit in Excel with more than 60k rows. What the hell is this chick talking about?

[–] zenpocalypse@lemm.ee 26 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

Seems like a good excuse to someone who doesn't know what they're doing and needs an excuse because why they haven't completed it yet?

The whole post is complete bs in multiple ways. So weird.

[–] psivchaz@reddthat.com 3 points 12 hours ago

It sounds like Hollywood tech lingo. Like when you're watching a movie or a TV show and the designated techy character starts just saying computer words that make no actual sense in the real world, but I guess in CSI: Idiottown the hard drives have severe overheating issues.

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[–] person420@lemmynsfw.com 24 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Some interesting facts about excel I learned the hard way.

  1. It only supports about a million or so rows
  2. It completely screws up numbers if the column is a number and the number is over 15 digits long.

Not really related to what you said, but I'm still sore about the bad data import that caused me days of work to clean up.

[–] driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 8 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (2 children)

It completely screws up numbers if the column is a number and the number is over 15 digits long.

I work in insurance in Brazil, by standards of our regulatory body, claims numbers must be a string of 20 numbers (zfill(20) if needed). You can't imagine the amount of times excel had fucked me up rounding down the claim numbers, this is one of the first things I teach to my interns and juniors when they're working with the claims databases.

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[–] jkercher@programming.dev 37 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

60k rows of anything will be pulled into the file cache and do very little work on the drive. Possibly none after the first read.

[–] Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 7 points 14 hours ago

You can put 60k rows in Excel 95.

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[–] NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 18 points 19 hours ago

“I store my records on vinyl. You’ve probably never heard of them.”

[–] sirdorius@programming.dev 66 points 1 day ago (1 children)

When the only thing that is stopping kids from dismantling your government is an O(N^N) algorithm

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[–] Psaldorn@lemmy.world 195 points 1 day ago (2 children)

From the same group that doesn't understand joins and thinks nobody uses SQL this is hardly surprising .

Probably got an LLM running locally and asking it to get data which is then running 10 level deep sub queries to achieve what 2 inner joins would in a fraction of the time.

[–] _stranger_@lemmy.world 82 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

You're giving this person a lot of credit. It's probably all in the same table and this idiot is probably doing something like a for-loop over an integer range (the length of the table) where it pulls the entire table down every iteration of the loop, dumps it to a local file, and then uses plain text search or some really bad regex's to find the data they're looking for.

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[–] zalgotext@sh.itjust.works 108 points 1 day ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (6 children)

my hard drive overheated

So, this means they either have a local copy on disk of whatever database they're querying, or they're dumping a remote db to disk at some point before/during/after their query, right?

Either way, I have just one question - why?

Edit: found the thread with a more in-depth explanation elsewhere in the thread: https://xcancel.com/DataRepublican/status/1900593377370087648#m

So yeah, she's apparently toting around an external hard drive with a copy of the "multiple terabytes" large US spending database, running queries against it, then dumping the 60k-row result set to CSV for further processing.

I'm still confused at what point the external drive overheats, even if she is doing all this in a "hot humid" hotel room that she can't run any fans I guess because her kids were asleep?

But like, all of that just adds more questions, and doesn't really answer the first one - why?

[–] Bosht@lemmy.world 48 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'd much sooner assume that they're just fucking stupid and talking out of their ass tbh.

[–] kautau@lemmy.world 19 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

Same as Elon when he confidently told off engineers during his takeover of Twitter or gestures broadly at the Mr. Dunning Kruger himself

Wonder if it’s an SQL DB

Elon probably hired confident right wingers whose parents bought and paid their way through prestigious schools. If he hired anyone truly skilled and knowledgeable, they’d call him out on his bullshit. So the people gutting government programs and passing around private data like candy are just confidently incorrect

[–] vapeloki@lemmy.world 80 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Have you ever heard of case of overheating hard drives within the last decade?

[–] spooky2092@lemmy.blahaj.zone 57 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Plus, 60k is nothing. One of our customers had a database that was over 3M records before it got some maintenance. No issue with overheating lol

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[–] zenpocalypse@lemm.ee 19 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

Even if it was local, a raspberry pi can handle a query that size.

Edit - honestly, it reeks of a knowledge level that calls the entire PC a "hard drive".

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[–] GoodEye8@lemm.ee 24 points 1 day ago (9 children)

My one question would be "How?"

What the hell are you doing that your hard drives are overheating? How do you even know it's overheating as I'm like 90% certain hard drives (except NVMe if we're being liberal with the meaning of hard drive) don't even have temperature sensors?

The only conclusion I can come to is that everything he's saying is just bullshit.

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[–] vk6flab@lemmy.radio 363 points 1 day ago (28 children)

Wow.

I've been processing a couple of billion rows of data on my machine, the fans didn't even come on. WTF are they teaching "experts" these days, or has Elmo only hired people who claim that they can "wrangle data" and say "yes" ?

[–] bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 214 points 1 day ago (36 children)

Even if querying data was processing-heavy and even if somehow the ‘hard drive’ got warm during this, then there still would need to be a hardware defect in order for the drive to overheat.

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[–] tiefling@lemmy.blahaj.zone 139 points 1 day ago (12 children)

60k isn't that much, I frequently run scripts against multiple hundreds of thousands at work. Wtf is he doing? Did he duplicate the government database onto his 2015 MacBook Air?

[–] easily3667@lemmus.org 137 points 1 day ago (5 children)

60k is laughably, embarrassingly small. It's still sqlite-sized.

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 49 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Sqlite can easily handle millions of rows. Don't sell it short

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[–] 4am@lemm.ee 75 points 1 day ago (3 children)

A TI-86 can query 60k rows without breaking a sweat.

If his hard drive overheated from that, he is doing something very wrong, very unhygienic, or both.

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[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 35 points 1 day ago

Hard drive was made by Tesla

[–] madeinthebackseat@lemmy.world 62 points 1 day ago (11 children)

As a reasonably experienced "data guy," this seems obviously laughable, but the discussion on X is scary. This guy is a savior in the MAGA world.

We can criticize and poke fun all day, but it doesn't matter much if our message isn't challenging the mindset of those with other opinions.

How do we make better use of our time to impact outside opinion?

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[–] Professorozone@lemmy.world 14 points 21 hours ago (12 children)

I didn't know hard drive overheating was a thing. Should I be worried that my 5 year old hard drive is about to overheat. I mean is this actually a floppy disk or something?

[–] melpomenesclevage@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 19 hours ago

it is a thing, but any competently designed computer should have things in place to prevent this.

unless you're an arrogant dipshit and disable all the hardware safeties on your computer to make it go faster and wear harder.

[–] ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org 9 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

When an HDD works continuously it can heat up to above 60 °C if proper air circulation is not allowed, which can cause a very premature failure. In fact, it should be kept under 40 °C to achieve the intended lifespan. Unfortunately, PC cases are usually not great at removing heat from the HDD by default.

As for your drive, it most likely has a temperature sensor so it can be displayed by various utilities.

[–] Estebiu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

I have a 12v fan running at 5v spitting air on my hdds, and that's enough for them to go from 55°C to 29°C, lol.

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[–] fossilesque@lemmy.dbzer0.com 62 points 1 day ago (7 children)

I cannot believe these people make more than me lol.

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